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Last Updated: Apr 27, 2007 - 11:26:32 AM |
It is a legal dictum that, often, good law is made by bad litigants. There are few people at any level of politics who can claim to have been pure as the driven snow. One doesn't have to rely on Atiku's good character to recognise that the court has read the Constitution and seen that its meaning was clear. The office of the Vice-Presidency is an elected office and under the Constitution, not the rules of a political party. Nigeria is not a parliamentary democracy; like the U.S. its system creates a separate executive branch outside the parliamentary party which may originate from the political process but, having been voted in, then represents all of the people, not a particular party.
The job of a Vice-President is always difficult, especially if the President is an activist and enthusiastic participant. The most famous comment on the post was made by Roosevelt's V-P, John Nance Gardener, who described it as 'not worth a bucketful of warm spit'. In fact, the US has spent long periods without a V-P.
The Vice-Presidency was actually vacant for over 36 years in total. Until the passage of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution in 1967, there was no means of replacing a Vice-President who died in office or resigned, or of appointing a new Vice-President in the case of the President's death or resignation elevating the incumbent to the higher position. (Since then the process of replacement has been used twice, in 1973 to appoint Ford and in 1974 to appoint Rockefeller.) So the post was left vacant for periods of over three years following the deaths of President Harrison in 1841, Vice-President King in 1853, President Lincoln in 1865, President Garfield in 1881, Vice-President Hendricks in 1885, President McKinley in 1901, and President Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. Altogether seven Vice-Presidents have died in office (George Clinton, Gerry, King, Henry Wilson, Hendricks, Hobart and Sherman), two have resigned (Calhoun and Agnew), eight became President as a result of deaths (Tyler, Fillmore, Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and Lyndon Johnson) and one as a result of Presidential resignation (Ford).
Quite often the V-P found he has lost the support of the party which originally put him in office.In the nineteenth century Vice-Presidents tended to find it difficult to secure re-nomination; in fact, once the present election system had been set up by the 12th Amendment in 1804, only two sitting Vice-Presidents in a hundred years were even nominated on the same ticket for re-election with their Presidents - Daniel Tompkins (VP to Monroe, 1817-1825, who died shortly after leaving office just before his 51st birthday - the shortest lived of all VPs) and R.M. Johnson, VP to Van Buren, who failed to get all of Van Buren's electors to support him in 1837 and had to be elected by the Senate, and like Van Buren lost to Harrison and Tyler for re-election in 1841. Johnson can be said to be the only Vice-President who failed twice to be elected by the electoral college. John Calhoun, elected as John Quincy Adams' VP in 1825, fell out with him and was instead elected as Andrew Jackson's Vice-President in 1827. He then fell out with Jackson as well and resigned in order to become a Senator in December 1833.
So, the Nigerians who attack Atiku for bolting the PDP, or having been ejected from the same. should realise that this turn of events is common in a presidential system; not an anomaly
Source:Ocnus.net 2007
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